Swimming Easy in the Deep

UNDERSTANDING RELATIONSHIPS

Most of the challenges anybody ever faces have to do with their relationships with other people: parents, siblings, friends, enemies, strangers, suppliers, clients, spouses, children, supporters, opponents, bosses, employees, bank managers, teachers, doctors, counselors, patients, priests, idols, heroes, competitors. The list seems endless.

Countless millions and entire lifetimes are spent trying to make, break, change, fix and understand relationships. 

Despite more probably having already been written on relationships between people than any other topic newspapers and magazines are dominated by stories about relationships gone wrong and new books punting the next-best-one-size-fits-all instant remedy for fixing them reach the top of the best-seller lists all the time.  

This is strange because the most difficult thing about relationships is realizing how simple they really are:

• There are only two roles in any relationship: “screwer” and “screwee”.

 

• Everybody in every relationship is destined to spend time in each of these positions.

 

• In a healthy relationship everybody spends more or less equal time in each of these positions.

If you find yourself at the bottom most of the time the relationship is in trouble, but no more so than if you were always on top … and this applies to every relationship you or anyone else will ever have.

At first blush this may sound simplistic and gimmicky. It isn’t – as Tom Robbins had occasion to point out, being light hearted is not the same as being light weight.

When you are having or are afraid of a relationship-related hiccup on any scale – and they can range from the mundane to the monumental – it is often sobering, enlightening and surprising to draw up a quick balance sheet of who was where, when and for how long in the relationship. 

Don’t be surprised to find that things have gone awry not because of anything the other person has done but because you have been getting your way too often and for too long.

 

WHEN THEY WRITE THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD ...

In my real life I wear many hats: environmental law consultant ... chef … accidental artist … sometime political analyst ... blogger ....

Most of the time the universe plays along quite happily to help me keep as many balls in the air as I like. Sometimes, just sometimes, those invisible forces that govern the universe conspire to have some fun at my expense and as is the case this morning (it is barely 04h00 and I have been working for a while) make that really difficult – I think they enjoy watching me scramble as I handle crises in rotation of receipt!

At times like these it is not always easy to keep insisting on joy in spite of everything and I often find it necessary to physically slow down, refocus and re-centre. Over time one learns: Slowing down speeds you up.

Without fail this involves my Dad who turns 80 next year. He is not a man of many words. Born and raised on a farm in what is now Botswana his actions have always spoken louder than his words but when he does have something to say it is usually worth listening.

When stress levels rise and things seem to be going wrong I am reminded of him saying:

“When they write the history of the world, how much space are they going to devote to this?”

And when things did go wrong as they inevitably do from time to time his stock-standard response is always: 

“The Boer War  was worse, then they killed donkeys … and people!”

You can replace “Boer War” (in which by way of useless information my grandfather - his father - was one of the youngest combatants at age 11) with your local equivalent such as the War of Independence or whatever.

I don’t know how original these sayings are and that really doesn’t matter.

When it comes to wisdom:

• What matters is what you do with it, not where you get it; and
• It wouldn’t be wise if it weren’t meant to be shared or couldn’t be used!

 

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE - THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

The Holy Grail for scientists is finding a single theory of life and everything; one organising insight that will explain how the universe works in all its multifarious manifestations.

This scientific obsession is driven by the delusion that humans must, by definition, be able to explain everything in terms that they find satisfying and acceptable. Yeah, right … explain why beautiful women so often marry dog-ugly men, why you can’t unlearn how to ride a bicycle (try it sometime), or why a toothache disappears in the dentist’s waiting room ….

The irony is that while we hate to admit it, we actually know that we know very little and much of the angst and most of the Counselling industry that typify our age is driven by a denial of this understanding.

We have conned ourselves into assuming that we live in a world that works by logical, human-friendly rules and as the evidence mounts that this is clearly not the case more people become more confused and more frightened every day.

It is precisely because we are kidding ourselves that we struggle.

Once we accept that while there may be lots of little rules that work some of the time (like gravity, physics and the inverse correlation between how bad medicine tastes and how good it is for you) the universe reveals an obtuse logic, a single, all-encompassing law that applies to everything and everybody, always.

Had we been at the creational take-away counter this is probably not what we might have ordered but it’s a lot more fun than the bland “meat and 2 veg” alternative we would probably have signed up for. 

Whether we like it or not, we live in a vastly complex universe in which everything is interconnected and where what happens is entirely independent of what we may want. As Lynne McTaggart demonstrates in “The Intention Experiment” we cause things to happen way beyond our understanding and reach all the time.

There are only two ways to respond to this realisation: denial or acceptance.

It is only once we accept that we are largely clueless and probably not in control of anything that it becomes possible to see that our universe and everything and everybody in it actually is governed by a single all-encompassing law albeit one many of us don’t necessarily like:

The law of unintended consequences (LUC for short) which holds that for every intended consequence there is an equal and opposite set of unintended consequences.

The “Law of Unintended Consequences” is not something I thought out. It has been the subject of philosophical speculation for ages and some people have even tried their hand at reducing it to “science” (he he).

Everything I have ever managed to find about the Law of Unintended Consequences is flawed in the same way – the authors, thinkers and writers in question all seem to think that we can somehow anticipate the unintended, know the unknowable. This explains why they all limit the law to stating that intended consequences will cause unintended ones too without recording that these will always be unknowable in advance (or else they wouldn't be unintended in the first place).

Newton’s Third Law states that: "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction". Good scientist that he was, Newton and all those who followed him only gave credence to the “real” world and assumed that laws of physics can only apply in a physical world where they could be observed and measured. They were wrong.

The same law holds equally true in the invisible force-field of which we are all part. The only difference is that this invisible realm cannot be reduced to one-dimensional causal relations where the equal and opposite reaction is a simple “push-back”.

Our intentions cause vibrations throughout the infinitely large spider’s web that is the universe (or if you prefer, cause ripples across the lake of infinity) where they meet up with the vibrations or ripples of untold numbers of other intentions. In symbiotic resonance they compose a flawless unique and original part for the symphony of life every moment of every day.  How the universe responds we can never know in advance.   What we do know and should never forget is that it will respond.  Always has, always will.

Scary? Not at all! There are theorems that qualify the Law of Unintended Consequences and the most important of them all is that the universe works to encourage what is good and discourage what is bad. If we insist on joy in spite of everything, we will find it and cause it.

In the words of John Lennon in “All you need is love”:

There's nothing you can do that can't be done.

Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.

Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game.

It's easy.

 

Nothing you can make that can't be made.

No one you can save that can't be saved.

Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time.

It's easy.

…

All you need is love.

…

Love is all you need.

 

Nothing you can know that isn't known.

Nothing you can see that isn't shown.

Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be.

It's easy.

 

All you need is love.

…

Love is all you need.

THE SECRET TO SUCCESS: POSE AND SUBSTANCE

Life comprises two elements:

• Pose; and
• Substance

To succeed at anything you need both and progress requires you to adopt the pose until – or even in the hope or expectation – that the substance develops.

The logic is really quite simple:

• Unless you look the part you are never going to play the part; and
• There’s no use in looking under “L” for Landing in the Idiots Guide to Flying when you’re about to touch down.

 If all you have is pose your deception will be exposed sooner rather than later. If all you have is substance nobody is going to believe you and you are likely to end up on the sidelines somewhere.

 We all pose. More often than most of us would like to believe. Most often with no idea where the substance will come from. All we can do is trust the universe to deliver … and it usually does.

Ironically pose is not something that is adopted just for the benefit of others, so that we will look right to them, but as importantly so we will look right to ourselves. Our subconscious is a fickle and peculiar thing. It will kick into action to flesh out a new pose at the drop of a hat but will slumber in the background in the absence of one.

This notion of “pose and substance” has an interesting footnote. 

We have been taught to believe that there are only three kinds of knowledge:

• What we know we know;
• What we know we don’t know; and
• What we don’t know we don’t know.

While this may be scientifically accurate in the sense that it can be proven, life isn’t always scientific. At some point in our lives, with some more often than others, everybody finds themselves knowing how to act in a completely new situation, something they had never dreamt of having to do. How does that work?

While scientists may not like it, there is a fourth kind of knowledge: What we don’t know we know.

Those among us who are more easily more willing to adopt a challenging pose are usually also those who most readily accept that we can tap into a universal source of knowledge in ways we may not be able to explain or understand but which is there if we expect it to be. Some people accept this consciously and are able to use it at will. Most, however, only discover or use this parachute of knowledge when they are in unexpected crisis … and then end up believing it was dumb luck. More’s the pity!  

CRAZY WISDOM: ROBBINS SAYS IT BEST

The aim of Swimming Easy in the Deep is to be a serious bit of fun that nudges readers into smiling at life so that they can experience the joy of receiving a celestial grin in return. 

Which is easier said than done and I must confess to finding it really hard to be light-hearted all the time and have ended up writing posts that are longer than intended, more cerebral than they should be and about as funny as a utility account.  It seems I am struggling to escape the ubiquitous subconscious suburban conviction that light-hearted must be light-weight.

So it was with some relief that I came across a new interview with Tom Robbins on the meaning of Crazy Wisdom and how it works.  Robbins starts all his novels with a single "perfect" sentence and then completes them one sentence at a time trusting the universe to lead him from the one full-stop (period if you are in the States) to the next until he gets to the last one.  Apart from being really funny and having an organic - some would say orgasmic - resonance with the vagaries of a universe that defies the vanity of our collective delusions of order, he writes extremely well and has a turn of phrase that few can equal.  A quote from Still Life With Woodpecker will suffice:  "Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature".


One day maybe I will be able to write blog posts as prescient as this excerpt from an interview with Tom Robbins called "Wisdom of the Rebels" in the July issue of Shambhala Sun:

   

Shambhala Sun: How would you define crazy wisdom?

Tom Robbins: The quick and easy answer is that crazy wisdom is the deliberate opposite of conventional wisdom. Like most quick and easy answers, however, that one isn't really satisfying.

For want of a precise definition, we might consider that crazy wisdom is a philosophical worldview that recommends swimming against the tide, cheerfully seizing the short end of the stick, embracing insecurity, honoring paradox, courting the unexpected, celebrating the unfamiliar, shunning each and every orthodoxy, volunteering for those tasks nobody else wants or dares to do, and perhaps above all else, breaking taboos in order to destroy their power. It's the wisdom of those who turn the tables on despair by lampooning it, and who neither seek authority nor submit to it.

What's the point of all this? To enlarge the soul, light up the brain, and liberate the spirit. Crazy wisdom is both transformative and transcendent.

WHERE YOU STAND DEPENDS ON WHERE YOU SIT

There is much ongoing debate in Prince Albert where we live about whether to allow the golf course to be shifted and upgraded as part of a much larger initiative that would open up space for a middle-class suburb which is sorely needed by especially those folks who have outgrown the historically Coloured township, establish a housing node outside the historical core of the town and mean that there is something more closely approximating a golf course than the present bare Karoo scrub with 9 holes scattered around it.

In a town as small as this it is inevitable that emotions run high whenever any kind of change is mooted and it is encouraging that there are so many people interested in what happens.

It is also hardly a surprise that there is a stark dividing line between those who support the project and those who oppose it.  Those who support the project are generally those who experience the town as a working town where they are trying to improve their lives and build themselves a future.  Those opposed tend to be more recent arrivals who moved here because it is a small town and are afraid that it could lose its charm and appeal if it grows any further.

Which reminds me of the old truism that: "Where you stand depends on where you sit".  This insight is claimed as original by Rufus E Miles Jr. who was an assistant secretary to various American Presidents but it is probably as old as the study of human behaviour itself - and remains as valid today as it was then.

I can (and probably will) devote a separate blog to the fact that life is lived from the inside out ... always ... by everybody.  Fact is that everything we see or do takes who, what and where we are as its point of departure.  Whether it be consciously or subconsciously we are all trying to get or be somewhere even if that somewhere is staying exactly where we are. 

The problem, of course, is that our lives constantly intersect with the paths of others who seem intent on getting somewhere else.  It is normal to resist being taken somewhere else, to somewhere we don't  want to be so we end up in a never-ending struggle to impose our path of choice.

There are two problems with this struggle:

• While the routes may be different, the destination is surprisingly often the same; and
• The fact that you path crosses mine doesn't necessarily mean that they need to share more than the crossing.

Unless we are able to understand where the "other" person is sitting we can never even begin to understand why they take a particular stand.  It is only once we are able to understand where they are coming from that we can either live with their intentions or figure out how to challenge them.

There are very few clear-cut "either/or" situations in which there is room for only one point of view.  If we stop being so attached to what we think we know to be be true and allowed ourselves the luxury of an open mind every now and then we would be pleasantly surprised at how often we can live with (and prosper as a result of) a change of mind.

Which is easier said than done.  As I pointed out the other day, Krishnamurti was spot on when he referred to the tyranny of the known.  What we think we know already is a tyrant that governs with an iron fist.

THE HARDEST THING TO LEARN

Krishnamurti is not as well known in the West as he should be.

A gentle and humble man he was born in India in 1895 and unusually for the time raised within the Theosophical Society. In 1929 Krishnamurti repudiated all connections with organized religions and ideology. He accepted no fees for his talks, no royalties on his books and recordings and used to sit under a large tree holding discussions with visitors. Jiddu Krishnamurti died in1986.

There are many websites devoted to Krishnamurti and his teachings and his works which have now been translated into forty-seven languages, including Swahili and Afrikaans attracted a wide range of people including George Bernard Shaw, Greta Garbo, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Albert Einstein, Alan Watts, Jackson Pollock, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Christopher Isherwood and Charlie Chaplin.

If there is a central teaching by Krishnamurti that has most influenced my own way of thinking it is the insight that the hardest thing to learn is something you think you already know.

The problem is, as he understood and explained, that we are all burdened with a lifetime of knowledge, things we have been taught, learnt, felt and experienced and that we define ourselves and engage with the world by relying on what we think we know instead of doing so with open minds.

As a result we are all victims of the tyranny of the known and are condemned to making the same mistakes over and over.

This is not just a philosophical abstraction. Many if not most of the most dazzling discoveries in any field are made by mavericks or newcomers; those who do not accept or play by the proverbial rules of the game.

In a sense by sticking to what we know we become sets of answers looking for problems and life becomes a lot like a paint-by-numbers picture. There are no paint-by-numbers pictures in the National Gallery and it is no surprise that our paint-by-numbers approach to life doesn't work!

THE MOST INCONVENIENT TRUTH

Scientists struggle with the reality that everything in our universe is connected to everything else and that nothing happens in isolation.  If there is a single scientific organising theory of everything we haven't figured it out yet so they have to limit themselves to just a tiny fragment of this greater whole and trust that whatever they find fits into the bigger picture beyond their world and their work.

This "polony slice" approach to science in which we isolate bits of reality has served us well and helped us cure polio and the pox and led to the invention of the wheel and bubblegum.  It also poses one of the biggest threats to happiness we humans are ever likely to encounter during our sojourn in this universe.

It doesn't take a genius to understand that global warming and poverty are  two  of the most pressing issues of our time.  Wherever one looks there are reports on the cataclysmic consequences of ever more people more poor and more wretched in more places than ever before and aberrant weather patterns.  Desperate photographs of skeletal waifs compete for prominence with panoramic vistas of flood damage and endemic drought.

Despite all the hype, the Nobel Peace Prizes and the celebrity concerts with which we assuage our collective conscience, the problems just seem to get worse.  The drive to use bio-fuels exacerbates an already acute food shortage.  Famine and political instability in much of the Third World puts entire populations beyond the reach of relief aid.

It is commendable that modern-day crusaders are willing to gird their loins and do battle with the demons of climate change and hunger.  In supporting their efforts we all feel as if we are helping to make the world a better place.

But are we?  I'm not sure.   

We are so caught up in the drama of it all that there is a single, simple, most inconvenient truth that we collectively ignore(probably because it is too dreadful to contemplate) and it is this:

Beating poverty means keeping more people alive for longer.  Keeping more people alive for longer means massive relief oriented spending and consumption.  All of which means an exponential increase in all the processes that drive global warming.  Put differently, to beat poverty we may need to fry the world.  Or, if your preference is environmental: To reverse global warming we need fewer people.

Think about it: Relieving poverty means that we have to provide the poor with proper housing, sanitation, health care, food and education.  This can only be achieved through a massive increase in the construction of everything from roads to power stations to houses and a similar increase in the production of everything from nails to diapers.  As more people survive and prosper there will be an inevitable exponentially growing demand for shoes, for sanitary pads, for electricity, for fridges, for transport, for entertainment. 

If we ignore this demand people will stay poor and wretched.  If we meet it there will be more greenhouse gases than ever.

Does this mean that we have to let some people die so that the rest of us will be better off?    Or that we can ignore the devastation we wreak on our planet?

I think not although I also think we are not too far away from fundamentalist groups advocating these kinds of "solutions".

What I do know is that how we respond to this dilemma will determine the future.

As I see it, evolution doesn't make mistakes (which is just another way of saying that where we are at any given time is exactly where we should be).  Whatever we do, the sun will still rise in the mornings and set in the evenings, the universe will carry on as it always has.  We may not always like what the universe delivers but it will always deliver.

It would be nice for us to know all the answers but we don't.  All we can and must do is to have faith in the universe to encourage what is good and discourage what is bad and our individual and collective ability to tap into that universal power for good ... and then do our best.

If our intentions are good then, even if we have no idea right now of how we will meet the competing and seemingly irreconcilable challenges of poverty and global warming, the universe will respond by guiding us to a solution. 

If we are more concerned with looking and sounding right than being right the universe will expose our deception.

On an individual level the only appropriate response to the challenges we face is to be gentle in our interaction with other people, especially the poor, and gentle in our engagement with the environment.

And to smile.

Insist on joy in spite of everything.  If you think this is bad or that the challenges we face are unfair imagine how that first tadpole-like thingy must have felt as it crawled out of the ocean to spawn all the creatures of the earth ....

THE SCARCITY OF SCARCITY

Remember when you used to look forward to going to the movies or when having an ice cream was a treat?

Ever wonder why many of us look back with longing at the “bad” old days when we had so much less?

Most of us believe that life comprises two elements: the ordinary and the exceptional and that our lives are defined by the exceptional things that happen to us.

For something to be exceptional it must be rare or scarce. Whether it is something nice or something bad doesn’t really matter as long as it doesn’t happen often.

In our minds we set up a scale to see whether the good stuff outweighs the bad stuff. Which is all very well except we keep making the mistake of believing that the more we have of a good thing, the better it will be.

Imagine for a moment if every one of us could sing beautifully, everybody would sound the same; if all women were equally pretty, they would all look the same; if everybody could run equally quickly, there would be no point in holding the Olympics. The same holds true for more everyday things like ice cream, clothes and movies.

We all learn that the ordinary is never exceptional but the exceptional can become very ordinary very quickly and most of us fall into the trap of trying to stay ahead of this inevitability.

The result is that the better off we get the unhappier we become – the exceptional is always something we are chasing. The only thing that is increasingly scarce is scarcity itself and that gets harder to find all the time.

The culture of entitlement that drives our spending lies at the heart of this dilemma. We have grown to expect only the best all the time. Getting what we want has become ordinary; not getting it, exceptional.

All of which is just another example of how our values have gone crazy.

Instead of celebrating the abundance we mourn not having more. Instead of making peace with who we are, where we are and what we have, we are driven to be someone else, be somewhere else and to have more stuff.

To fix this we need to realise two things:

• happiness is not a destination or a commodity, it is a state of mind; and
•  scarcity is a matter of opinion.

Buying something, getting something or going somewhere will never make you happy unless you want to be. Being unhappy is the easiest thing on earth, whether you get what you want or not.  If you decide to be unhappy, you will be.

What makes something special? Lots of things can help to make something special but ultimately it is only special if you decide it is. If you decide something is ordinary then, no matter what else, it will never be special. Conversely, you can decide that something which most people would be consider to be very ordinary is exceptional and it will be so, no matter what anybody else may think.

 

This is a profound insight and one that can change your life if you take it on board but it is easier said than done and most people find it incredibly hard to go from learning to doing.

Here are a few tips:

• Live in the moment. Really focus on the right now. You can’t change what is past and can’t know what lies ahead.
• Immerse yourself in the immediate sensation. Is this good? Is this bad? Bad has its purpose too. You won’t know what’s good if you never taste bad and most of the bad stuff passes quite quickly anyway.
• Give thanks for the good, accept the ordinary and ask mercy for the bad. By consciously labelling your response you will realise that even if you eat ice cream every day it stays special.

The irony of this approach is that as you become more conscious of how you feel right now, as you learn to savour your blessings as you receive them no matter how small, you will discover that the ordinary can be quite nice too.

Decide to be happy and you can be  ... most of the time ... promise.  Try it, it works.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KICKING A BALL AND KICKING A DOG

I read this somewhere when I was still teaching at university and wish I could remember who the author was because it has stayed with me always.

    When you kick a ball, the reaction is in the kick. 

    When you kick a dog, the reaction is in the dog.

A ball is an inanimate object and will do what you intend it to do.  A dog is not and it is just as likely to run away with its tail between its legs as it is to bite you in the butt.

The next time you want to kick someone - and even more so when next you get kicked - remember this:  You own your reaction and you control how you respond. 

Challenges look very different once you realise you can choose how to respond.